


betting on losing dogs

by campfires



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Art Forgery, FBI Involvement, Illegal Activities, International trade, M/M, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Substance Abuse, antiques, sad boys clinging to the past, they wear bespoke suits everywhere. it's poetic, trust fund babies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 15:17:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12962244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campfires/pseuds/campfires
Summary: “Yeah okay,” Murphy mumbled. It fell in their midst, the ghost of a whisper, a quiet promise in the grayscale shadows.





	betting on losing dogs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blueparacosm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/gifts).



> international road trip gone shockingly wrong at most turns, trouble in the most broken and angsty paradise possible. mostly just here to flex a creative muscle of some sort.  
> disclaimer— this was hugely influenced by donna tartt’s body of work, especially the goldfinch and the little friend, (both excellent books you should read instead of this) so if there are any similarities between them that's why.  
> warnings for:  
> substance abuse (oxycontin)  
> copious mentions of scars  
> symptoms of ptsd  
> death of a loved one  
> semi-graphic violence  
> pretentious art history rambling

_“I wait, and I wait, to make a new start_

_A new beginning, but it feels like the end_

_And it takes one to know one_

_And I'm really not sure_

_If I can put things back together like before”_

_Warmest Regards - Half Moon Run_

 

** n. **

_Bellamy’s voice, soft and simple in his ear. “Wouldn’t want to do anything else.”_

Murphy remembered everything as vividly as if it were happening over and over on the insides of his eyelids— a technicolour film on a constant, dizzying loop. They’d taken him, roughly and without much room for negotiation, to an energy-sapping compound of hard industrial edges and identical grey walls. The cuff of his tweed jacket scratched at the papery skin of his wrist, already sensitive from the cold metal bite of the handcuffs. The older investigator, who had introduced himself as Kane, peered across the aluminium table between them, face distorted in the shiny reflection: a sallow cheekbone swirling, his aquiline nose rendered bulbous and lopsided.

“Are you listening to me? I need you to tell us where it is.” His voice echoed hollowly around the steely confines of the room. Murphy looked up at him insolently. Kane’s eyes had a quiet, alcoholic melancholy about them; moist and glassy with pouchy, bruise-like bags underneath. Murphy was reminded of his mother, a sour twist sparking in his gut at the resemblance.

“With less bullshit this time,” the blonde one barked, sneering at him from the corner, her teeth flashing under the waxy florescent lights. Previously, Murphy had told a long, meandering story about how he had stolen it— finishing with a reminder that the theft had occurred four years before he was born. She hadn’t introduced herself, and Murphy only knew her name — Griffin — because Kane had to keep calling her off when she’d started shouting. She was flighty and restless, bouncing her leg on the chair and pacing in an agitated little zigzag around the desk. He guessed that they were around the same age, and the way she held herself showed that she saw a clear divide between them. She lorded this over him; placing herself, ministerial and morally upstanding with her flashy FBI badge, farther above him with every arrogant gesture. Murphy leaned back to face her in the uncomfortable hardback plastic seat, handcuffs clinking as he raised both hands to extend his middle fingers with a flourish.

Griffin’s eyes (a milky green, thunderous under her knitted, flaxen brow) darted to Kane and he threw up his hands in a boyish,  _what can I do about it?_ gesture that didn’t fit with the sad slope of his shoulders and his scruffy salt and pepper beard. Murphy attempted to surreptitiously roll his shoulders. The effects of the roughhousing from his arrest were becoming more insistent now, pain wrapping its searing hands around his head and settling a heavy palm in the space between his shoulder blades. The bridge of his nose still ached where it’d been struck on the edge of their rosewood cabinet, the musky floral scent of the wood lingering long after its initial impact. The blood pooled in his cupid’s bow had become sticky and irritating. He sat up straighter despite the flare of pain across his back, pressed his clammy hands together, and attempted to look as put-together as anyone could with a bloody nose and crooked glasses.

“Listen,” Kane said to Murphy, low and desperate, wide palms pressed to the tabletop and a curl of dark hair falling onto the shiny, pallid skin of his forehead. “You’re under for —” he paused to flip open the manila folder on the desk with a soft  _thwip!_ and a bubble of laughter rose in Murphy’s throat at how incredulous it was, images of staticky television sets and the monotonous, oversaturated world of clichéd cop shows coming to mind at this gesture. “Forged provenance, which is a serious offence —”

“Minimum of twenty five years in prison,” Griffin supplied from the left, arms folded across the dull shine of her satin blouse, navy suit jacket dangling carelessly from the fingers of one hand.

Kane’s head snapped towards her, startled at her sudden proximity, and it struck Murphy that they didn’t make a very convincing team. “Yes, but if you just tell us,” he leaned forward on his elbows, the shoulders of his suit bunching around his shoulders, ashen coffee-breath breaching Murphy’s personal space, “ _where it is_ , your jail time could be reduced.”

Murphy rolled his eyes, sending a sharp pain ricocheting around the base of his skull in protest. He tapped his wrists twice on the tabletop, and the hollow clang of metal-on-metal matched the manufactured emptiness of the building satisfyingly. He sniffed. “Fuck you.”

 

 

**i.**

Murphy picked his way across the floor of the basement with the light of the moon as his guide, careful not to brush up against any of the drying paintings or scattered canvas frames and gently tugging at the lapel of Bellamy’s paisley robe, fingers slipping on the sleek material. Murphy recognised that it had belonged to Bellamy’s mother, its heavy silk worn and familiar. The frowsty, overwhelming smell of drying oil paint was beginning to settle into Murphy’s skin, so thick he could practically feel it churning through the air. Bellamy murmured sleepily, something about midnight.

“What?” A hiss from Murphy, eyebrows drawn together in bemusement.

Bellamy turned towards him, eyelashes a dark smudge against his slanted cheekbones in the dim light. “‘ _Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary…’’_ ” He blinked heavily, eyes still glossy with sleep, reaching a hand up to sweep a tangle of curls from his brow in the punch-drunk way of those recently woken from slumber. “It’s Poe.  _The Raven._ ”

Murphy’s expression cleared, his lips quirking upwards in delight. Bellamy sighed, scratching at the back of his neck. “Why’d you bring me all the way down here in the middle of the night?” His words were sleep-slurred, rounded and elastic. Murphy tugged at his robe more insistently in answer. He pulled him along the maze of half finished paintings, past a mess of easels at the corner, their skeletal shadows long and ghostly in the silvery light. A covered canvas stood against the back wall, its beige cloth new and gleaming beside dusty furniture and boxes of old paperwork: sheaves of splotchy documents spilling out of cardboard homes, their ink faded and illegible. Bellamy tugged out of Murphy’s grasp when it came into view, his sleepy demeanour vanishing as he whirled around in disbelief, the velvety rustle of his robe leaving plumes of dust hovering in the air.

“No..” he murmured, eyes darting across Murphy’s face, half obscured in the muted light. “You didn’t. You just —” he paused, pressing the fingertips of his right hand to the side of his throat, just above his pulse, an old habit that managed to crop up every time he was anxious about something. “— Did  _not_.”

Murphy smiled, sharp and wolfish. He managed to look polished despite the dark crescents of sleep deprivation under his eyes and the rumpled lines of his suit, lean and angular with his hands in his pockets. Bellamy’s mouth formed the shape of a question before shutting abruptly, the snap of his teeth eerily loud in the nocturnal quiet. He turned to stare up at the canvas, hands flitting about jerkily, hovering over the sandy surface of the cloth.

“God Blake, just pull it.”

“I —” Nervous swallow, a ragged exhale of breath. “Can we ju—”

Murphy scoffed noisily, hands scrabbling to pull down two fistfuls of the thick material; pearly starbursts of white blooming at his knuckles with the effort. The sound was monumental, a deafening raucous of cloth against canvas, followed by the protests of thin computer paper tacked up on the wall, dozens of filmy Picasso prints snapping and fluttering in the disturbed air. Bellamy sank to his knees in the tangle of coarse fabric as the hem of his robe pooled around his ankles, paisley pattern alive and slithering. “Fuck,” he said. Quiet and astonished, the word settled into the space between him and the painting as though it were a hushed whisper of  _Amen_ from beneath the altar.

 

Rembrandt’s  _The Storm on the Sea of Galilee_ loomed above them in all its glory; honeyed yellows and deep stormy blues leaping out from the gloomy darkness. The wave— cresting and curling into the oily wooden boat, caught Murphy’s attention in the moonlight, expert brushwork mimicking the soft spray and tumble of sea foam. There were thin, hairlike cracks in the paint, a telltale sign of its age and authenticity. Bellamy turned his head to look up at him, hazel irises warm and intense, and it was so much all at once that Murphy had to look away, down to the dusty soles of Bellamy’s feet, long-toed like saints in stained glass windows. By then Bellamy’s attention had been drawn back towards the painting, and he was speaking in the rapturous, scholarly tone his voice had always adopted when greeted with artwork. “— I mean, look at the attention to detail, the tendons standing out in their hands and feet, their expressions. See the way they each have their own distinct faces? Not one of those men look the same. It’s a far cry from the Byzantine works of the renaissance, all those lifeless and identical faces. The composition is so- so interesting to look at, the fluid motion and clever use of light and shadow… This really is the height of Baroque — ” he ducked his head, shaking a head of sable curls, “uh, in my opinion.” Murphy stood in silence, hands shoved into the pockets of his slept-in suit, letting Bellamy’s voice fill the cramped, stifling atmosphere of the basement. He gained a lot of his knowledge of fine art (instrumental in selling any piece) from the ramblings of Bellamy, a perpetual fountain of information on art throughout the centuries.

“Anyway, he really captures  _movement_ here where the wave is, and it’s echoed in the way the disciples are positioned— desperate and straining.” Bellamy’s hand swooped along the curve of men at the ship’s hull, and Murphy’s eyes followed the gesture involuntarily. “Sure, there are hints of mannerism there,” his finger traced the elegant line of a shoulder, an arched back, “but ultimately it seems like he’s trying to humanise the followers of Jesus. Relate them to us.” He sighed, palms flat on the grimy basement floor, leaning in as far as he could. “Look at how Christ glows! There’s no dull grey Duccio skin tone, it’s… it’s like Rembrandt brings him back to life.” He inhaled deeply: nostrils flaring, eyes alight. “See how he’s left off the gaudy round halo? Those big, distracting gold coins on the back of saints and angels’ heads?” He turned back again to face Murphy and mime it — his big, expressive hands waving an invisible golden arch over his head.

 

Murphy remembered a conversation they’d had soon after moving in, where Bellamy had expressed his distaste for orthodox Byzantine art.  _“Listen,”_ he’d said, one knee resting on the plush armrest of an upholstered burgundy armchair, bare foot bobbing at the edge of the velvet seat cushion. (Murphy struggled to recall a time when Bellamy had ever worn socks or shoes in the house.)  _“I respect the uh— strides that Byzantine artists made, the influence the genre had on the art world.”_ Here he’d snickered over the rim of his wine glass at where Murphy was lying, half drunk and sprawled across the grubby ornamental rug.  _“But would I want a fifteen foot altarpiece of Virgin Mary and the Christ Child in my kitchen? With their blank, haunting expressions? Fuck no.”_ Murphy had flopped onto his back at this, inadvertently staring up Bellamy’s nose.

“ _You just hate Duccio. Admit it, you don't mind Martini and the Lorenzettis, you kind of like Giotto, but you just — hate — Duccio.”_ To punctuate the last three words of this sentence he’d reached an arm up to jostle Bellamy’s leg; thumb resting on his kneecap, fingertips brushing the downy skin underneath, unexpectedly soft. Bellamy’s eyes, dark and complicated, had lingered on Murphy’s hand for a second too long before he’d stood up gracefully and reached for the wine bottle on the cluttered lid of the grand piano— it stood proudly among crumbly spirals of peeled orange skin and sheet music peppered with coffee ring stains, beside a chipped bowl with an inch of curdled milk and bloated cereal at the bottom. The setting sun had splashed the side of his face in hues of vermillion and amber, the colours watery through the dust on the living room window. _“You forgot Cimabue,”_ he’d said, carrying on the conversation smoothly as though nothing had happened, as though their world hadn’t stood still on it’s axis for half a second. Murphy could hear his smile curling his words into bright and playful things, steering them back into the realm of friendly conversation.  _“I hate his work even more than Duccio’s.”_

 

He tuned back in to what Bellamy was saying and joined him on the floor of the basement, both of them a careful foot away from the gigantic painting. His knees cracked in half-hearted protest. “Instead of all that there’s just a touch of light around the crown of his head. Again, kind of mannerist— unnatural and refined, but he does it in a subtle way. A portrayal of divinity that’s realistic, you know? It’s easy to match up how he’s painted here with Mark’s description of him as the Son of God.” Bellamy’s eyes flicked all over the canvas, but they kept settling on the grecian slope of Christ’s nose, his regal hands. There was a long stillness, the only sound their breathing and the creaking of the storefront above them. Murphy felt his eyelids grow heavy, a fuzzy feeling climbing through his joints, the familiar ache of fatigue. Bellamy spoke up just as Murphy’s head slumped forward, chin grazing the knot of his tie. His head jolted, neck aching sickeningly.

“Where was it?” It was more accusatory than questioning, but there was no bite behind it. The moon had come out from behind the clouds, spilling in through the high window and shining across the floor towards them, towards the colossal Rembrandt. Murphy folded his glasses slowly and tucked them into the silky inside pocket of his blazer, rubbing at the pink marks left behind on the bridge of his nose.

“Germany. This village in Bavaria, near Memmingen.” His voice dropped in volume, but he didn’t stumble over the pronunciation of the word, and Bellamy remembered that he had been carrying around a battered pocket-dictionary in the days leading up to his sudden departure: the word  _Lagenscheidt_  blazed across its faded yellow cover. “It was in Ottobeuren Abbey. Like, it was wedged behind the organ, wrapped up in all these sheets of newspaper,” he paused to make two L shapes with his thumb and index finger and spread them out as if to set the scene, milky fingertips luminescent in the shafts of foggy moonlight. “And it was so weird. Unwrapping it was like— pass the fucking parcel. There were new editions from every year since the nineties… like someone had come back to wrap it up in a hundred fresh newspapers each year.” His voice was halting and spellbound, as if he were explaining a dream. “I still have no idea who got it there, or why.”

In Ottobeuren, Murphy had stared up at the twisting statues lining the church walls; one hand clasped around the handle of his briefcase, sticky with sweat, his shirt collar plastered to the back of his neck in the May heat. He’d been edgy about his German, turning over the phrases in his head as he stood in an alley beside the church to crush his cigarette butt under the heel of one polished shoe.  _Guten Morgen. Entschuldigung, ich spreche nur ein kleines bisschen Deutsch. Wo its es? Das Gemälde?_ The back of his dictionary had been peppered with phrases to use during an emergency, and the one that had stuck out to him most was:  _halted den Dieb! — Stop, thief!_ Its compact black font and angry exclamation point, still bold and clear against the yellowed paper, had rattled around in his head during the flight. Oddly, Murphy had been expecting to hear it all morning; his shoulders tensed, ready for it to chase him up and out of Germany and into a jail cell. The towering marble church angels had made him no less anxious— arching lustreless wings, soft like candle wax in the sparkling sunlight, did nothing to soften their sly and heavy-lidded eyes: following him around the room, weighty and judgemental.

His own eyes danced around, saltwater irises catching at the curve of Bellamy’s thighs, hovering around amber oil painted sails on the canvas before finally settling on the high window. “Anyway, the place was really beautiful. It had this uh— Rococo basilica and tons of Baroque statues.” At this Bellamy turned his head in surprise, dark eyebrows raised and the ghost of a smile at his lips. Murphy’s fingers skittered across the nape of his neck, ducking his head to avoid eye contact, “Yeah, you would’a loved it. I’ll take you there sometime.” His voice had slipped back into its rough mixed accent, the way it always did when he was tired or caught off guard; flickers of his Canadian father and Boston mother in the way he elongated his vowels, rolled his o’s. The silence hummed between their shoulders, full of something complicated but pleasant.

“How’d you get it back here?”

Murphy arched a pointy eyebrow. “Do you really want to know that?”

“Guess not.”

The same silence fell, now charged for an entirely different reason. Bellamy heaved a miserable sigh, but by the time Murphy had made up his mind to say something else he was already absorbed in the painting again. The tone of his voice was hard to read, barely above a whisper: “Can we stay here with it? just for a while?”

Murphy swivelled to look at him. The worshipful slide of his eyes, his reverent posture: broad shoulders and straight-backed spine draped in silk, his hands a tangle of freckled knuckles and stout artist’s fingers, the thumb of one hand pushing into the palm of the other. For a second Bellamy was Christ-like in the shafts of dusty moonlight: from his crown of thorns (a tumble of sooty curls), to the tilt of his chin and slope of his brow, somehow both sovereign and humbled. “Yeah okay,” Murphy mumbled. It fell in their midst, the ghost of a whisper, a quiet promise in the grayscale shadows.

 

Murphy woke in the early hours of the morning, stinging eyes staring into the blues and blacks of an oil painted seascape. His cheek was gritty when he peeled his face away from the basement floor, propping himself up to lean back on his forearms. Bellamy was on his back opposite him under a wrinkled bed of cloth, a square of sunlight from the window illuminating one shoulder, the downy tip of his nose. Their legs had become intwined at some point, the arch of Bellamy’s left foot resting on the inside of Murphy’s thigh, just above his kneecap. He pushed it aside gently and clambered to his feet, the urgency of opening the shop pressing at his temples along with the desire for caffeine. Later; after he had boiled the whistling tin kettle and checked the sleek grey answering machine by the front door for any new messages (its red LED blinker flashed madly with a voicemail from Miller, delivered with typical snark and brevity: “If you’re there, fuckface —” this was aimed at Murphy, because he knew very well that Bellamy would never pick up the phone. “Call me back. Been trying to reach your pale ass for half a week and I’m starting to feel like a girl who was ditched on prom night.”) he returned to the basement, not yet changed out of his two day old, dust-caked suit, to set a steaming cup of tea beside Bellamy’s slumped figure. It was ginger— the tea bags that slithered out of their packet at the back of the cupboard and resided in a crumbly heap of filter paper and herbs in the corner, their smell musty and intense. Bellamy looked up sleepily and met his eyes, wrapping his hands around the cracked china teacup and curling over on his side in the mussed tumble of canvas. Murphy hovered over him, and to Bellamy’s sleep addled mind he looked like Jupiter; a hand held regally to his chest to hold back his tie, chestnut hair haloed around his head, backlit by the watery morning light and speckled with dust. Straight Roman nose, dignified brow, the swirling blue of his eyes rendered clear and cerulean in the sun. God of the sky, God of thunder. Bellamy closed his eyes again, happy to capture that image of Murphy in his mind and hold it behind his eyelids, already wondering how to paint it later. He mumbled incoherently, something that could have been a  _thanks_ or a  _good morning._ Murphy saw the dark knob of one hipbone and the scrunched band of his boxers, visible where his mother’s robe had slipped, a flare of knotted silver scar tissue in the hollow of his hip from a car accident when he was seventeen.

* * *

 

Murphy opened the store: threw back the stiff wooden shutters to let the light in, wiped down the proud oak cabinets and sullen cherrywood display cases as columns of dust blew about at his shoulders. He poked around in the Victorian cash register till, fingertips ghosting over its ornate dull brass, pocketing a few of the crumpled dollar bills tucked inside. Some days this was more difficult to do than others, but he liked feeling busy, being useful. He joined Bellamy upstairs for lunch after he’d blithely given tours and talked about items, and the thin crowd of upper East siders had bought their overpriced fake antiques and exited the shop. Murphy had spent many mornings in the steamy clamour of the kitchen (bafflingly located in the upper floor of the townhouse where the bedrooms were), and all these mornings blurred together in his mind, a myriad of memories of pushing open the the high arching windows above the stove and staring at the sleepy city street below him. He pushed a plate of scrambled eggs and spinach towards Bellamy that looked more like a snarl of herbs and twisting vegetation sprouting from fluffy lump of yellow soil— the food he cooked tasted delicious but always looked like a disaster; crumbled piles of quiche, messy heaps of soft fudge cake. Bellamy didn’t look up from the paperback he was reading, but held out his hand for a fork. “Thanks tiger,” he said absently, eyes still scanning the pages in front of him. Murphy snorted at the nickname, throat flushing where the collar of his shirt met skin.

He remembered leaning out of the window of the store a little over a year ago, watching Bellamy put out the trash and sing sweetly under his breath, back when he’d been perpetually high on oxycontin.  _“Tyger tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.. what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry..”_ Murphy smiled at Bellamy’s habit of turning poetry into song, something fragile aching behind his ribs.  _“You know what?”_ Bellamy said. He’d turned, eyes half shut, waggling a finger at him under the dusky sky.  _“You’re my tiger. A bright burned tiger.. symmetrical and fearful. My tiger.”_ He had walked up to stand at the ledge of the window, slow sedated movements at odds with the mumbly euphoria in his voice. “ _When the stars threw down their spears! And water'd heaven with their tears..”_ His drugged singing was low and throaty, delightful to listen to as long as you ignored the heavy sadness behind it, looked away from his glassy eyes and downturned mouth. Murphy had wrapped his hand around the finger pointing at his chest, wishing that he could take Bellamy’s sadness away with that touch alone like Jesus healing the downtrodden, knowing that a wish like that was futile.

 

Most afternoons went like this now: a clatter of cutlery and the scratching of a pen on paper, music from the crackly record player in hallway. The store closed for lunch, Murphy glancing over at the clean line of Bellamy’s freshly shaved jaw when he wasn’t looking, trying to stay preoccupied with forging a certificate of authenticity; Bellamy eyeing Murphy’s slender hands and the pale column of his throat while he flipped through the pages of his book. A synthesised psychedelic rock song drifted in through the door, something Murphy had heard enough times to recognise. Bellamy’s music taste was limited to three bands: _My Morning Jacket, The Chocolate Watchband_ and  _Heart,_  because a handful of albums from each were the only records he owned. He’d found them in his mother’s room before his childhood home had been repossessed, a teetering stack in the corner beside a vase of wilted tulips and a dusty collection of empty perfume bottles, inches of amber and rose liquid still sparkling inside the tiny glass bottles.

“How do you spell ‘guarantees’ again?” Murphy said. He was hunched over the certificate now, the gold leaf border casting small flecks of honey coloured light across his furrowed brow. Bellamy looked up from his food, blinked twice and spelled it out for him, no questions asked. By now this exchange was natural: Murphy’s mild dyslexia was something he’d mostly overcome, but he still read out loud with Bellamy on lazy afternoons, both of them spread out on the ruffled sheets of Bellamy’s plush double bed, windows thrown open wide to tempt a breeze their way. Forging documents had been born out of this, copying the words over and over and working meticulously to learn and remember. Where Bellamy’s room was alive with sketches and paintbrushes, oil paints and acrylics, lumps of clay and thick graphite pencils, Murphy's room was filled with fluttering copies of paperwork, signatures and dates in neat compact script, jet black and royal blue  _Montblanc_  pens he’d stolen from Miller in small flowerpots on his windowsill.

“Where’s it gonna go?” Bellamy said suddenly. Murphy looked up from his work, a swipe of black ink on his chin. He drew a small rectangle in the air with his index fingers to indicate the painting in the basement, eyebrows raised in question. Bellamy fought to keep a smile off his face. “Okay, you don't have to make insipid gestures to say what you mean, we’re not in a fucking spy novel.” The humour came through in his voice anyway, despite his attempt to sound scathing. Murphy leaned over to flick the spine of Bellamy’s book, (bound in masking tape to keep it from falling apart) now resting at the edge of the table, one of Murphy’s pencils acting as a bookmark.

“Aren’t you reading a  _fucking spy novel_  right now? Forgive me for playing to your interests and trying to be creative in an everyday conversation,” he said with mock indignation, a hand splayed across his chest for added melodrama. Bellamy’s slipper collided with the tip of Murphy’s brogue under the table, his kick rattling the plates and cutlery on the tabletop. “If you  _must_ know,” Murphy said, rolling his eyes and leaning back in the chair, “we’re going on a trip to deliver it to the buyer.”

Bellamy paused with a forkful of food halfway to his mouth, and the sense of an argument about to happen rumbled in the air of the small kitchen. “…A trip,” he said flatly.

Murphy carefully avoided his eyes, studying the nib of his pen as if it were more interesting than the concerned steeple of Bellamy’s brow. “Yeah, a trip. We’re country hopping,” he scratched at the side of his nose, a nervous gesture that betrayed the calm of his voice. “With Miller, for three weeks.”

“ _Country hopping_ ,” Bellamy repeated incredulously, abandoning the fork at the side of his plate, the scrambled egg on its prongs slinking sadly into a puddle of Worcester sauce.

Murphy swallowed. “It’ll be a nice holiday.”

“A holiday?” Bellamy frowned angrily, eyes darkening. “I’m not fucking..” he cast around for the words, throwing a hand up in frustration. “I’m not  _stupid_  Murphy, I know what this is. Just be honest with me.”

Murphy held an exasperated sigh behind his teeth and it settled heavily on his tongue as it died away. “Bellamy, I can’t,” he ran a finger along the shell of his ear, face flushed with embarrassment. “You can’t be a part of this side of things.”

“I’m already a part of it anyway.” Bellamy never raised his voice in arguments, instead it became a scornful half whisper, simmering with anger just beneath the surface. “You can’t shield me from illegal trade because it’s  _my work_  that you’re selling, passed off as Pablo fucking Picasso and Willem de Kooning.”

There was a stony silence. Murphy, who often raised his voice in arguments, managed to repress this and speak carefully, although it was clear he did it begrudgingly. “The reason you can’t help me sell any of this is so that if we ever get caught, you can say that I did all of it under your nose and that you weren’t involved.” He inhaled deeply, one hand gripping the side of the oak table. “I did that so  _I’m_ the one who goes down, not you.” His cheeks had become a blotchy pink and his eyes were complicated. Bellamy looked away, quickly deciding to drop it and steer clear of this new topic. He hooked a fingernail under the peeling masking tape that obscured the author’s name on his book, its weak adhesive grabbing at the pad of his finger.

“Well that’s just stupid,” he said, “we’re not gonna get caught.”

* * *

 

The days leading up to the trip were muted, quiet.

Bellamy lay on his stomach atop Murphy’s bed, (two single mattresses stacked, shoved into a dusty corner of his bedroom), his cheek smushed into the soft linen pillowcase. He stared up at Murphy, who cut a shadowy figure against the setting sun, whirling around cotton shirts and silk ties and watching them tumble into the open suitcase at his feet. Murphy dropped swiftly to the floor with hunched shoulders to dig through a mahogany chest of drawers, his fingers long and lithe and searching. He ambled over to crouch in front of Bellamy, holding up a hardback copy of  _The Iliad and The Odyssey,_ its beige cover striped with the red ribbons of sunset creeping through Murphy’s flimsy venetian blinds. “Found this last night,” was all he said, his breath a wash of cherry wine and cigarette smoke. He tucked the book into the space between the crook of Bellamy’s elbow and the pillow. Murphy’s voice was tinged with something sad. “Check the first page when you feel up to it. I think it was hers.”

Bellamy stared up at him, at the curve of his bottom lip, the dip of his collarbone at the hem of his open collar. He moved to cup his hand around Murphy’s forearm and pull it towards him, pressing the warm weight of Murphy’s hand against his own cheek, feeling his pulse jump under the velvety skin of his wrist. It was more than a  _thank you_ , more than an  _I’m glad you found this._  It teetered into something unspoken, something that was a little too bright for either of them to look at directly. Murphy inhaled slowly through his nose and ran his pinky across Bellamy’s left eyebrow quickly, as if he were afraid to press anything more than a fingertip there. “Okay,” he murmured under his breath as if Bellamy couldn’t hear him, couldn’t pick up on the shake in his voice, “okay, okay, okay.” He pulled away with a rush of air and a shuffle of socked feet. Bellamy heard him pause at the door, mess with the clunky brass knob for a few seconds. He almost turned to face him, and if he’d looked over his shoulder he would have seen Murphy’s lanky frame hunched and vulnerable, frowning obstinately at the floor with a blush all the way to the tips of his ears. Time passed slowly, warped the way it always was at dusk, after sunset when the birds had stopped chirping: too late for dinner, too early for bed. “So. G‘night,” Murphy said, just as the door was shutting heavily, sliding across the scratchy carpet and back into its thick oak frame.

 

Bellamy would never read that book. He tiptoed around it and lovingly felt the weight of it in his hands, but it was too painful for him. It was also too new, and too factory manufactured. Bellamy had an undying fondness for all things ancient— Murphy quietly thought that it was because he’d come from old money, had grown up around the sprawling decadence of crumbling wealth, everything decades old and proudly preserved. However, Bellamy stuck to the firm belief that every object had it’s own history, it’s own experiences and stories to tell. The evidence of this lay scattered around the house, tumbling towers of ratty paperbacks from the sixties and seventies crowding the hallway, tiny bricks on the edge of the bathroom sink: airport novels with pages of limpid newsprint hanging loose on their spines, glossy outdated coffee table books stacked beside Murphy’s combat boots, disgusting to him in both their age and state of disrepair— the ones Bellamy persuaded him to keep because he’d worn them when they’d first bought the place.

 

Murphy’s hand had scrabbled at the shoulder of Bellamy’s leather jacket, jolting them both forward and knocking his bony hip against a solid one. “ _Shit-fuck! Fuck!”_ He exhaled sharply, furious and incredulous, twisting around to look at the back of his left shoe. The pad of his thumb pushed into the warm muscle at the base of Bellamy’s neck as he groped around at his own foot with his other hand, pulling it up to inspect the damage. “ _You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”_ Bellamy shrugged out of his grip. Overtired and sober from the flight over, he was both nauseous and irritable. He wiped the back of his hand against his uncomfortably sweaty forehead to stare at Murphy: shivering in the threshold of their new home, rain-damp hair plastered to the side of his face, eyes big and clear, unsettling in their brightness despite his hooded lids and constant frown. Murphy in a flimsy black t-shirt and second hand Goodwill military trousers, Murphy who was still scrappy and underfed and didn’t know how to dress for the weather. Clutching his foot: the sole of one combat boot hanging off its heel like a dog’s tongue, with a rusty crooked nail through the tip: glimmering and pendulous. He bit his bottom lip and exhaled, the beginning of another,  _“fuck!”_ that ended up as a sigh instead. Bellamy, tired of this already, had darted forward and ripped the sole clean off, throwing it wildly over Murphy’s head and into the street. He grinned lazily and watched Murphy grin back, twice as alive, twice as whole.

 

So Bellamy did not read the book. He tucked it into the space behind the washing machine one morning, barefoot and with his mind full of sadness. A melancholy fog so thick and overbearing that his limbs felt heavy with it, knuckles dragging against the exposed brick wall of the basement in a frantic effort to push the spine of the book further into the crevice. It had been four years, and he still saw his mother’s eyes every day. Peering at him from the front seat of the car, honeyed brown irises sun-drenched and lovely as her tongue tripped through Bellamy’s name in an amused, chiding sort of way: her last conscious moment on earth, or at least the last one she’d shared with him.

* * *

 

Murphy climbed through the house steadily, flipping switches off and snapping cabinets closed, methodically ticking things off on a tiny leather pocketbook with the nub of a 4B pencil resting between his fingertips. He’d seen Bellamy staring angrily at the twin suitcases standing by the front door: one the colour of sandalwood and the other a deep red wine. Now he could hear Bellamy retching wetly over the kitchen sink, the clunk of his forehead on the kitchen counter. Murphy stomped down the staircase for dramatic effect. “Bell!” he shouted, toes curling around the ledge of the step he was standing on. “Bellamy, we’re leaving soon!” He figured it was best to act as though he hadn’t heard anything, and leave Bellamy as much dignity as he could. A sullen figure emerged from the gloom of the hallway, shoulders slumping.

“This is a mistake.”

“You’re going with me.”

There was a flurry of movement from the direction of the kitchen: a short, clipped shake of Bellamy’s head. “You can cancel the ticket, it’s not too late.” Murphy could hear the shuffle of Bellamy’s hands against the material of his shirt, could practically feel the waves of apprehension and fear rolling off him.

“You’re fucking going, Blake.” He punctuated the end of the sentence by flipping his pocketbook closed with a soft ruffle of pages. “And we’re already checked in, so I couldn’t cancel that even if I wanted to.” Murphy had woken up early and keyed their flight number into the airline’s website, the screen flickering it’s sickly blue-white glow across his face in the dark of the early morning. Muted clicking and typing could not muffle the rhythmic thrashing of fabric from the next room: indicating Bellamy’s fitful, nightmarish sleep, the one recurring dream that always managed to happen the night before they had to go somewhere.

“Fi-“ Bellamy gagged silently by the doorframe of the kitchen, throat working in the dim light. “Fine.”

 

Later, under the migraine-bright fluorescent lights of the airport, Bellamy’s creative and callous hands twitched and spasmed around the handle of his suitcase, shifting restlessly while they waited in line for the plane. He leaned over, chin inches from the dyed wool of Murphy’s suit jacket, his front pressing a long, anxiety-riddled line against Murphy’s back. “I hate this, and I hate everything we’ve ever done.” Murphy could smell his acrid vomit-tinged breath, could feel how scared he was in the breathy waver of his voice. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever liked airports. We were always late for our flight..” He trailed off, shifting his weight back so he was hovering behind Murphy, barely touching him but so close that he might as well have been. “Well. I always remember us being late. You know,” lackadaisical tap of his knuckles against the hollow between Murphy’s shoulder blades, knocking him forward half a step in his new Oxfords. “I used to have this dream where my mom was holding me on her hip.. really tightly, and we were just running and running through this awful white tunnel. All I could hear was her shoes against the floor and the- the tick of her suitcase’s wheels. I don’t know if that actually happened or not.”

The middle aged woman in front of them was starting to take notice of Bellamy’s rambling, head tilted ever so slightly in their direction, her inquisitive eyebrows sharp under a wispy blonde fringe. Bellamy was still breathing into Murphy’s space, the steady rise and fall of his chest heart-wrenchingly essential to Murphy in that moment, like birdsong over a whisper of tree leaves. He opened his mouth to say something, maybe an apology to the woman, maybe a mumbled reassurance to Bellamy. Just as his lips were forming the words he was cut off by the loud whine of the speakers overhead, and the bored voice of someone announcing that their flight was now boarding.

 

The first half of their flight was a disaster— Bellamy practically vibrating with anxiety beside him, his knuckles white and pearly, fingers digging into Murphy’s arm. His frequent stumbles to the bathroom, gagging into the shiny vomit bags, countless plastic cups of cool water and crumpled paper napkins littering their airplane tray tables. Murphy pressing a hand between his shoulder blades and telling him repeatedly that it was alright, it was fine, they were going to be okay. Bellamy smiling at him nervously beneath limp, sweat drenched curls, the fingers of his right hand shaking where they skimmed his pulse point. Murphy’s face falling into a strange half-grin, his thigh flush with Bellamy’s where they’d lifted the armrest between them. Eventually after Bellamy had fallen into a sleep of deep breaths and shuddery sighs, Murphy closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He leaned forward to press his elbows into his knees, push his hands through his hair, fold in on himself the way he’d learned to in the trailer he’d grown up in, a movement that came as easy to him as breathing. Palms pressing painfully into his forehead, he screwed his eyes shut tighter and tighter until his vision bloomed into bursts of sparkling silver against black. Bellamy’s words from earlier echoed around at the forefront of his mind:  _“I hate this, and I hate everything we’ve ever done.”_ He thought of Bellamy’s kind, soft eyes looking up at him, genuine fear at the edges of his irises, and he silently agreed.

 

Rome was falling from dusk into night when they arrived: the sky a smooth indigo, air still warm with the fading sun of the day. They met Miller at the mouth of the airport’s exit, trailing their suitcases behind them. He stood proudly by the luggage carts in a fitted double breasted coat, burgundy doeskin flapping at his knees as the automatic doors slid open and closed to his left. ”Gentlemen!” A wide sweep of his open arms, the velvet of his collar alight under the flashing beams of passing car headlights. “Bellamy..” he murmured, with the same degree of fondness one would use to greet a family member, mouth curling into a smile as he inclined his head. He reached up to pull Bellamy into a hug, eyes crinkling as he smiled with perfectly straight teeth, bright against his dark skin. “How was the flight?”

“Oh, eight hours of hell,” Bellamy said, melting familiar and safe into his arms and chuckling deeply, all but lifting him off the concrete. Murphy swallowed, cutting his eyes away from the two of them to dip his head and light a cigarette.

Miller wrinkled his nose as he caught Murphy’s eye mid-exhale. “Still our little chimney?” He asked, an arm casually slung across Bellamy’s hunched shoulders. Miller, who had never been addicted to anything except maybe spending money, derived a strange delight from taunting Murphy about his reliance on cigarettes. (However, he never dared to bring up Bellamy’s past substance abuse problems. For this Murphy was thankful, and more than willing to take the brunt of Miller’s half-insults.) Murphy had a deep affection for Miller, but seeing him again after a few months always made something in the pit of his stomach ache. Miller was a sharp reminder of everything he was not: he’d been born into wealth and splendour just adjacent to Bellamy’s old money inheritance, (they had been raised like brothers, finding solidarity in each other and their mutual sets of interracial parents— largely uncommon in the wealthy circles they were obligated to mingle in as children) and the straight-backed, regal way in which he conducted himself brought back the feelings of deep inadequacy Murphy had first felt when he was just starting out in the business: bruised-up West Roxbury trailer trash, barely an adult and scrawny in his hand me down suit. From Miller’s side, Bellamy snorted.

“Come on Nate, he’s hardly little.” At this Miller rolled his eyes dramatically, smoothly darting to the left to pull Bellamy’s suitcase behind him as he walked briskly towards the crosswalk opposite the doors of the airport, narrowly missing a collision with a Mini Cooper, screeching on it’s breaks. Miller didn’t flinch, instead rooting around in his flap pockets for his car keys on the other side of the road. The car’s horn blared in response— followed by a string of rich and colourful Italian out of it’s rolled down window, the driver obscured by the glare of a nearby streetlight. Bellamy rushed forward (keeping a broad distance between himself and the hood of the car) to hold a peaceful hand up in apology, laughing lowly under his breath with Murphy slinking behind him and pressing a hand to the small of his back to push him forward, cigarette bouncing on his bottom lip as he cursed Miller openly, knowing he was in earshot of them.

 

In the cold metal interrogation room many weeks later, he would remember this moment as the one that had really kickstarted everything, and he’d wonder what they looked like to that faceless driver in the front seat of the shiny blue Mini Cooper. Three men in their early twenties, bounding across the road and teeming with youth. He’d wonder if the driver noticed their differences: the expensive cut of Miller’s coat, it’s shine of newness and the pride that drove all of his purposeful movements. Bellamy’s bent head and the shining pink of his raised palm, the humility that shone through the lines of his grandfather’s Henry Poole & Co. suit jacket, ill-kept and thin with age. Murphy’s spindly fingers splayed across Bellamy’s back, the usually-invisible scars across the side of his face illuminated in the car’s headlights: shining chips of pale silver curving along his cheekbone and stretching onto his temple, a deep nick across his jawline. In Murphy’s mind he always carried the ghost of his teenage self at his heels, forever cropping up in the slip of an accent, the wrong lighting, whenever he missed a beat during a conversation with a potential client. He rewound the crosswalk memory over and over in his head in the empty room. In the end, had they just looked like a group of over-dressed dilettantes?

 

Miller jangled the keys to his car, a gleaming white well-kept convertible, low on it’s wheels and at least two decades old, the double headlights flashing once in greeting as he pushed the unlock button. Murphy squinted in the rapidly dimming evening light— he suspected it was a Rolls-Royce, but he knew better than to ask. Bellamy’s ease and casual laughter had long dissipated when faced with the prospect of actually getting into the car, and he hovered near it with visible apprehension, as though it were around an unpredictable wild animal ready to attack. His forehead was dewey with sweat, his face having slipped a few sickly shades lighter while Murphy’s back was turned. He resisted the urge to reach out and touch him, because he’d already done that earlier, and subsequently wondered when he’d started monitoring casual interactions with Bellamy. Miller’s hand hovered over the door handle to the passenger’s side. “Murphy, you in the front?”

Bellamy tensed by his side. Murphy shook his head, the excuse premeditated and rolling off his tongue with ease. “Makes more sense if we put the suitcases up front.”

Miller’s expression crumpled, eyes darting to where Bellamy was studiously avoiding his gaze before he arranged his features into a neutral passivity. “Ah, you’re right,” his hand curled into a loose fist above the door handle, dropping to his side limply. “There’s a reason you’re on the accounting side of this business, Johnny.” As he bent to push the suitcase handles into their shiny plastic homes his strong shoulders deflated ever so slightly, and Murphy’s heart broke for him in the corner of the dusty airport parking lot. His heart broke for the three of them, that they’d continued to play through this tired charade over and over to help their fractured friend, because the cruelty of the world still felt like a fresh bruise no matter how many times it struck them, and because they didn’t know any other way to help him. Murphy allowed himself one rise and fall of breath and then the feeling was gone, then he was all business, sliding into the back seat alongside Bellamy. Miller turned the keys and the engine rumbled to life underneath them with some mindless Italian pop song flooding through the speakers, . Then they were gliding across the asphalt, the speed of their movement whipping the air into sweet summer wind that kissed the crowns of their heads.

* * *

 

The plane journey had, admittedly, been a disaster; but Bellamy’s genuine, bone-deep fear lay in car travel. It couldn’t be avoided and he didn’t like to cause a scene over it, so he tried to grit his teeth through it every time he was cornered into taking that particular mode of transportation. Miller and Murphy knew the particular circumstance that caused this aversion, but not the details. He hadn’t told them about how it had happened, the incessant chime of his mother’s phone in the glove compartment of her car— a gorgeous Jaguar XJ6, a cherry red gift from Bellamy’s father when they’d first become involved —and his fingers scrabbling at the latch, trying to open it and silence the noise, all because of a migraine that had been pressing insistently against his temples during the car ride home from piano practice. He hadn’t told them about her last words, the  _“Never mind, I’ll answer it when we get home, Bellamy—”_ that played on a constant loop in his dreams, in the back of his mind, the words that bled into everything he did and everything he would ever do. Miller was driving carefully, he knew that, but every bump in the winding country roads caused a sick, animalistic fear to jolt through him. Stomach oily, heart rabbiting in his chest, he relived the moment of impact in snatches. Slow motion, his mother’s fond expression turning to shock, loose black curls velvety and fanned out as they jolted forward and obscured her face. The haunting shadow of the semi-truck behind her, it’s steel nose hard and unforgiving behind his mother’s soft camel overcoat, her filmy white scarf fluttering in his direction. As Miller turned the car, slowly, considerately, Bellamy’s mind sprung forth flashes of their car veering off the road, Octavia’s choked off gasp and the sickening thud of her body against the back door of the car, his mother’s body lolling towards him as if she were boneless, a hand flung across the gearshift at a horrifying angle, the creamy skin of her hand and glossy red of her almond shaped nails showered with dangerously glittering shards of glass. Bellamy felt the tell-tale phantom pain in his right shoulder, the crush of his arm against pliable leather and hard glass. His mind, split between past and present, searched desperately for something to hold on to, and he leaned into the warm weight at his other side. Murphy. He held on to the thought of Murphy and his crooked smile, his hooded eyes, the thought of his oil paints and long, blank canvases waiting patiently for him in the basement of their townhouse, the thought of Miller and his biting humour, his odd, low laugh. His mind repeated his mother’s voice, sweet and almost syrupy in his ears:  _“when we get home— home, Bellamy— I’ll answer it when we get—”_ He put his head between his knees and held on to Murphy’s hand so hard that he was sure it was hurting him. He made up his mind to apologise profusely for that later, pressing his eyes shut so hard that it hurt, straining to hear the strange Italian music in the background, wishing he could find a way to make this easier on himself, easier on the people he loved.

* * *

 

Murphy ran his hand along the broad plane of Bellamy’s back, hand intwined with his, their sweaty palms pressed together in the silence of the car, parked in the driveway of Miller’s holiday house. The latter had run into the house in a flurry of burgundy fabric, one suitcase in each hand as he flew through the front door. Murphy could see his silhouette against the buttery light of the kitchen, reaching for something in a high cupboard, bent over the chopping board in the next second. Bellamy’s hoarse breathing filled their shared space, one arm hanging out of the side of the convertible, his face pressed into the crook of his elbow. Murphy said nothing, focusing on rubbing a small circle over the back of Bellamy’s hand. The tap of Miller’s shoes against his marble porch steps reverberated wildly in the odd stillness of the night— Murphy was never used to the absence of the city clamour, no matter how many times he left it. Miller mumbled a soft string of words in Bellamy’s direction and waved a wine glass in front of him, water with slices of lemon and lime swirling around among the ice cubes.

Bellamy’s hand slipped out of Murphy’s to cup the glass with both hands and drink. Miller’s eyebrows drew together over the sooty tumble of curls between them, and Murphy nodded. Everything was quiet, quiet, quiet; save for the dull tap of ice cubes against glass and Bellamy’s measured breathing. He ran his palms along his thighs in an attempt to soothe the numbness in them, and pushed the front seat forward before clambering out, careful not to jostle Bellamy’s knees. Bellamy kept his eyes low to the ground, but climbed out with a slow, deliberate dignity. He raised a hand to the flushed skin of Murphy’s neck, knowing where to find it on instinct, thumb brushing his jawline and lingering for just a moment before he settled it back against the wine glass in his other hand. It was a  _thank you._

Miller drew him into the house with his usual flair and glamour, talking nonsensically about the architecture of the house while Murphy lingered in the driveway. He could hear Bellamy’s murmured responses, low and humorous beside the enthusiastic swing of Miller’s voice. Murphy stood with his hand on the bonnet of Miller’s car, trying to draw some sort of strength from it’s cool, unblemished surface. The porch lights flooded the shining hood ornament at it’s front: the Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy with her long arms outstretched behind her, textured wings frozen in movement, almost mocking him.


End file.
